Carter's Foreign Policy Toward Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti Left Huge Marks on South Florida

The Carter administration era opened the floodgates to Miami. President Jimmy Carter’s name is indelibly tied to one of the largest sea exoduses in history, one that shaped Miami for years to come and arguably played a part in his reelection defeat: the Mariel boatlift.

Between April and October of 1980, about 125,000 Cubans came to South Florida in boats from Havana’s Port of Mariel, provoking political backlash for Carter, who, in a speech that May, said America would “continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom.”

His foreign policy left a profound impression in a city where thousands of Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan refugees fled from countries that his administration struggled to steer toward democracy — with little success. Carter died on Sunday. He was 100 years old.

“Carter’s record in Latin America was mixed,” said Eric Farnsworth, a former State Department and White House official who leads the Washington office of the Council of the Americas and the Americas Society. “He had some real successes. He was the first to meaningfully put human rights at the center of policy in Latin America. The main challenge is that he seemed to misunderstand the true nature of violent dictatorships. He thought that by engagement and diplomacy, somebody like Fidel Castro might be convinced to change the path of the Cuban dictatorship.” [...]

“Carter, I believe his heart was truly in the right place,” Farnsworth said. “He truly wanted to make peace.... He wanted to reevaluate the traditional U.S. posture in the region, trying to reduce the tensions of the Cold War. Those are laudatory goals. But the question is, did that desire, at some point, overwhelm the ugly reality of what was possible in the region at the time? I think that’s the question that historians will have to answer.”

Read the full article.